It's All Being Taken Care Of

Author's Note: Readings on this site will be chosen from the Daily Office readings from the Book of Common Prayer. Readers are encouraged to follow as many of those texts as possible, though only one will be selected for comment. Reading the selected text is assumed in the writing.

Text: Psalm 98

Never more than the day after Easter should we be aware of the wonderful things the Lord has done. He has, indeed, gained the victory and made His salvation known. Christ is risen!

It is likely that all of us need this reminder from time to time. We so easily find ourselves in a time of joyful worship on Sunday--particularly on Easter--and then back into a setting in which the victory of God has not yet been made known. This very experience is a major reason that each Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection; each week's worship should in some fashion point to the redeeming work of God in Christ, with the promise of completion in the days to come.

When the psalmist tells us to shout joyfully and sing, it is because of something that has changed and is changing. When God's salvation comes, things are different from what they were before. For salvation to have any meaning, there must be some condition from which to be saved. And it is a condition from which the saving work could not be accomplished on our own. Sin and death certainly qualify for such a condition. I suspect that while this psalm was written in celebration of a particular time in which God delivered His people from a hopeless situation and is worthy of our repeating when we experience such victory, the fullness points to an eschatological victory. It will only then be true that all the ends of the earth will indeed see His salvation.

Until that occurs, we will continue to see places in our everyday world where God has not yet won the victory in a visible sense; greed, frustration, despair, anger, jealousy, violence, etc., are all too much an active part of that world. Inequality, injustice among the nations are very real. War continues to tear apart communities and families. Christians sing and praise God not only, not even primarily, because of individual lives being transformed; they do so in anticipation of what God will yet accomplish on a much grander scale, inclusive of nations now at war.

I am especially encouraged by the closing words of Psalm 98. They assure us that it will not be a human decision as to who is judged and on what basis. Our world seems so intent on assigning blame and praise to people and nations based on so limited a perspective of what is really true, right, and just. Knowing that God Himself will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity takes it out of our hands so that we may live before Him in humility and in the steps of Jesus, whose resurrection is our guarantee that he can be trusted. So, yes, sing!